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Ancient Skulls Show Civilization Rose As Testosterone Fell
An anonymous reader writes Even though modern humans started appearing around 200,000 years ago, it was only about 50,000 years ago that artistry and tool making became popular. New research shows that society bloomed when testosterone levels in humans started dropping. A paper published in the journal Current Anthropology, suggests that a testosterone deficit facilitated the friendliness and cooperation between humans, which lead to modern society. "Whatever the cause, reduced testosterone levels enabled increasingly social people to better learn from and cooperate with each other, allowing the acceleration of cultural and technological innovation that is the hallmark of modern human success," says University of Utah biology graduate student Robert Cieri.
They will be evolved out of existence soon. The sooner the better.
I have trouble with pronouncements like these, because it's so easy to jump to conclusions about correlation and causation.
It seems like their conclusion might have a Politically Correct component. Could it be instead that civilization caused a general lowering of testosterone, because high testosterone levels were no longer vital to survival?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Will these man-haters ever shut up?
Instead of implementing agriculture and making ceramics, tribal folk were to busy voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act
A flourishing colony of low-testosterone pansies enforcing "civilized group-think" on a variety of topics important to Obamunist sycophants does not an advanced civilization make.
Seems like the biggest cause for the drop would be people realizing that their biggest baddest brutes, were seriously poor negotiators. Sending in the little guy because he was less threatening would make sense. Over time, less threatening males were necessary more and more often.
The Peaceful Middle East
The newest country on Earth
Civil society in the West
I am not a pessimist, but I will say that we are a far cry from being a "success".
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Because men are evil, obviously, and should disappear entirely for the profit of human kind.
Cultural marxism at its 'finest', if one can say it that way...
AFAIK Rome fell once it started contemplating flowers instead of keeping the army fit and ready.
Maybe Israel should go the same way? They would prosper like never before, wouldn't they?
Same goes for today's Europe.
And some idiots actually believe wising for peace and single-sided reduction of army readiness will magically remove all enemies that threat our civilization...
I seriously don't understand how they can measure the level of testosterone from 50,000 years ago. Was it recorded with fine detail? Hell, did they know it existed?
Anyway. The lower testosterone levels could be a coincidence that arose at the same time humans discovered the benefits of empathy, which is essential in group negotiations and community support.
reduced testosterone levels enabled increasingly social people to better learn from and cooperate with each other
Why not the opposite? Why not "better learning abilities and cooperation in increasingly social people causes testosterone levels to drop"?
Not that either needs to be true, mind you. Sales figure for strawberry ice cream correlate with violent crime, but neither is causally connected to the other (it just so happens that summer and hot temperatures make people more aggressive, as well as more likely to crave ice cream).
Captcha: "caveat".
civilization was only possible on a large scale once man began to become domesticated.
This is part of the extreme hostility toward men in the U.S. culture.
The body is extremely complicated. There are maybe a million chemicals? Choosing one supposedly connected with men but actually present in both men and women, testosterone, and talking about its importance is thinly veiled hostility.
The current wave of hostility of women toward men began with the book The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, a woman who was very confused about life. The book mentioned negative things men do, and avoided mentioning the negative things women do. Part of her viewpoint was influenced by the fact that she was trying to get women to have sex with her.
There is a movie that shows Simone de Beauvoir was treated as an equal by Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher and friend. She was not second.
Both Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre had terrible childhoods and both did things in their adult lives that demonstrated their confusion.
The Washington Post article linked in the Slashdot summary says, "No, this isnâ(TM)t some jab at dudes." Yes it is, and extremely stupid about biochemistry and civilization, also.
How much evil testosterone fills veins of these feminist speakers of hate?!
So much aggression in their actions and words.
The sooner feminists extinct the better for the society...
They have higher testosterone than other races. Oh, wait... getting a bit too close to the TRUTH for Slashdot. LOL.
really got to put this oestrogena bomb in production now...
Subjects with high levels of testosterone behave pretty much like savages animals, I have witnessed such cases. They behave aggressively, always trying to harm other men (domination, "alpha male") and trying to take woman by force, there is no way to have cooperation between this type of people. The chance to have cooperation between this type of people is very small.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
'Necessary' doesn't mean they had more babies, though.
What's more likely is that with the advent of agriculture, more people spent their lives living in one place, with a number of consequences. One is that women and their children were more likely to live their lives alongside their other children, so having more cooperative, less violent children became advantageous. Another is that women were more likely to be impregnated by one of the local farmers, rather than the hot wandering barbarian hunter or the gang of rapists.
Furthermore, there is a theory that the primary purpose of developing agriculture was not for food but for alcohol. It may have been that the peaceful farmers' access to stuff that could get women drunk was conducive to them having more babies.
What a great society we have evolved into when man-hating is a viable method to secure funding...
Aliens came down from the sky and told us to get our shit together. I have the same amount of evidence that this research has, I.E. I pulled it out of my ass, they just spent a few hours in a library before they pulled theirs out of their asses.
"which lead to modern society"
And now we have the bomb, albeit only for about 70 years
Lets hope that testosterone won't suddenly raise again..Bye bye feminism
US and and UK... not so much.
nostalgie de la boue
I, for one, could live more happily if the anti-human nihilists would just fall off the planet.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It makes little sense that testosterone levels independently started decreasing. Occam's Razor says that civilization and technology made it possible for weaker humans to survive thus the decrease in testosterone related features in humans.
In all seriousness:
... shall inherit the earth?
Civilization comes with war. Warriors need a lot of testosterone and battles lead to anihilation of hi-testosterone individuals. I find some evolutive path to decrease of testosterone.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
The study's results, however, contradict this view sharply. Test subjects with an artificially enhanced testosterone level generally made better, fairer offers than those who received placebos, thus reducing the risk of a rejection of their offer to a minimum. "The preconception that testosterone only causes aggressive or egoistic behavior in humans is thus clearly refuted," sums up Eisenegger. Instead, the findings suggest that the hormone increases the sensitivity for status. For animal species with relatively simple social systems, an increased awareness for status may express itself in aggressiveness. "In the socially complex human environment, pro-social behavior secures status, and not aggression," surmises study co-author Michael Naef from Royal Holloway London. "The interplay between testosterone and the socially differentiated environment of humans, and not testosterone itself, probably causes fair or aggressive behavior."
Moreover the study shows that the popular wisdom that the hormone causes aggression is apparently deeply entrenched: those test subjects who believed they had received the testosterone compound and not the placebo stood out with their conspicuously unfair offers. It is possible that these persons exploited the popular wisdom to legitimate their unfair actions. Economist Michael Naef states: "It appears that it is not testosterone itself that induces aggressiveness, but rather the myth surrounding the hormone. In a society where qualities and manners of behavior are increasingly traced to biological causes and thereby partly legitimated, this should make us sit up and take notice." The study clearly demonstrates the influence of both social as well as biological factors on human behavior.
Could it be instead that civilization caused a general lowering of testosterone..?
It *doesn't* work that way. Natural selection causes traits beneficial to survival/reproduction to become dominant. "Civilzation" cannot "cause" anything.
The conclusion reached by the researches is also nothing but a romanticized opinion, as we don't see lower levels of aggression in current humans.
The most likely (and brutal) cause-effect relationship is that tool makers, who were smarter and at least as aggressive despite their testosterone leves, dispatched the less intelligent high testosterone rivals and/or outbred them.
You can't build a civilization with *alpha* males; they have to *at least* be in beta.
(Preferably release versions, but you take what you can get.)
Ancient Skulls Show Extinctions Rose As Testosterone Fell.
Nothing worse than a bunch of apes pooling their resources to consume all the resources even faster.
High testosterone levels lead to dominant behaviour, aggression and generally a fixation with power and getting pussy. Cooperation and quietly working on things with others certainly takes a back seat then. It's individual success in terms of mating and dominating over success that is actually useful in the long run and with "boring" things.
That said, not being surprised in no evidence. In best /. fashion I haven't read the fine article, but I would want to see some mechanism that actually LEAD to lower testosterone levels. Evolution? Maybe, seems a bit short, but these are time frames that indeed were long enough to lead to lactose-tolerance to dominate in dairy-eating populations all over the world, so I wouldn't count out evolution rearing its head here. Mutations that supported drinking milk and eating cheese quickly dominated. Maybe other mutations that supported being more peaceful, not getting into pointless fights, and getting things done in a goal-oriented way instead of being fixated onto telling others what to do while holding on to five women without actually knowing what to do except fucking a lot also dominated for very good reasons.
And really: The lone fact that a LOT of people are totally capable to live their lives in dense populations without really fighting others all the time gives some weight to that. Maybe high testosterone levels are just incompatible with population growth and dense populations. Maybe they cause too much trouble to be successful (in an evolutionary sense) when all is said and done. Maybe the quietly working type of guys who are happy with one women and want to be left alone and leave others alone may be not as successful as the dominant asshole individually but there may be just much more of them and they don't get killed as often and raise more children altogether. Maybe even the fact that spraying your genes around isn't of much help when you can't support 10 women and their offspring and single women aren't that good in supporting their children plays a role here.
Every Genghis Khan may have fucked a lot, but he also will have killed a lot of men willing to fight and all the while those men who just got the bread home every day and just fucked one women were breading like rabbits and actually helped their children to prosper when you sum it up. Evolution isn't about individuals but about numbers of individuals actually surviving until maturity (and beyond, since a newborn child alone isn't going to survive for very long).
In Russia the women have boners?
How is this news? Is hating on men a viable way to make money now? Seriously, this is like saying estrogen is the reason why we aren't traveling back and forth from Mars today. Men have to spend a lot of time making women happy, because that's how they've been raised. Instead of working toward developing a viable warp drive, they have had to waste endless hours at the mall "shopping" and hoping that their behavior is rewarded with sex.
Seriously, the headline reads as "men are the root 'cause of all of our problems". How about making the headlines a bit more PC? Yes, men's rights are a PC issue too. I've noticed this is becoming more common as of lately.. did you all hire an "extremist"???
Correlation does not imply causation.
What is some student paper getting any attention? Don't put any weight into something that can't be proven, and most likely is made up to make an interesting paper to graduate. All that matters to the student is that it sounds possible.
But this is science now a days, stuff you can't prove, and has no importance on anyone reading it. Nothing needs to be checked by someone else before publishing it as true and confusing people.
It was because we started cross-breeding with Neanderthals. And then wiping them out, because they were *still* friendlier than we were.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
... and still be able to populate the world 10x over. If I could have back all that time that slipped through my fingers .... maybe I could have made something of my life..
I'm going to buy some licorice and get civilized. The liquorice plant is native to southern Europe and parts of Asia. Is that where ancient art and tools are found?
This comment is covered by the Popeye standard disclaimer.
Civilization lowered testosterone levels, explaining the physical weakness seen as nomadic tribes become settled, as well as their susceptibility to disease.
It's funny how the article, the scientists, and society in general are willing to buy bullshit like "low T causes civilization" instead of the inverse. The demonization of T, and men in general, is a serious problem.
Why TF has no-one brought up Ayn Rand yet? You know, the one who was on medicare and social security. So was the dude in that book a testosterone deficit beta loser or a sexy testosterone alpha over achiever champion? Which is it??!??! My brain is hurts!!!!!
Lead is a present tense verb or one of the elements.
Led is past tense.
Similarly, "plead" is present tense, "pled" is past tense.
We just need to wait roughly three hundred years at this point. The science fiction relies more on genetics than hormones, but you can make the extrapolation.
"Idiocracy" (2006) suggests Mankind's future still lies with testosterone.
HOMO-sissious LOL!!!
... our strange-browed ancestors liked extra bloodwine with their gagh?
The study is based on skull development and the influence testosterone has on it, DURING DEVELOPMENT, yet you bone heads are all arguing about it's effects in adulthood rather than on how it may also influence brain function in the young and therefore behaviour later in life regardless of adult hormone levels.
Apologies to anyone I have overlooked who did "get it".
Sounds like we can make anything up, like global warming, to advance an agenda like this. Male haters.
Milk was not evolutionary; changes in gut bacteria allowed the drinking of milk because of stupid human behavior they were not eating properly so those children who could use milk lived at higher rates.
The solution to many problems would be changing the evolutionary pressure so that aggressive and likely testosterone high males do not have offspring. It may currently be unusual but it is NOT crewel to vasectomy rapists and other violent offenders.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
That's pure speculation at this point. Falling testosterone levels may have been a consequence of civilization, not a cause. Or it may have been coincidental.
People really need to start separating scientific fact from speculation.
While I find interesting the idea that lesser testosterone is required for cooperation, my opinion is that the path to that conclusion is rather weak.
They studied testosterone-induced strong features in skulls, observed they vanished as cooperation raised, and concluded that testosterone must have lowered as cooperation increased.
But correlation is not causation. Another explanation could be that as cooperation increased, fights decreased, and hence the need for strong skull features.Testosterone could have remained at steady level while its effect on skulls lowered.
A better question is what testosterone level increases one's chances of passing on the genes TODAY. And the answer seems to be clear. Maybe evolutionary pendulum swung too far and the nature is trying to compensate.
these posts about feminists wanting to eliminate the male of the species is at the same time the funniest and scariest stuff i think i've ever seen on slashdot.
Absolute statements are never true
Lower testosterone followed civilization. If you got one alpha male that doesn't cooperate in society the other weaker males will gang up on him and kill him. So bye bye high testosterone alpha males.
"It has been empirically shown that boys who had a history of high physical aggression, from age 6 to 12, were found to have lower testosterone levels at age 13 compared with boys with no history of high physical aggression. The former were also failing in school and were unpopular with their peers. Both concurrent and longitudinal analyses indicate that testosterone levels were positively associated with social success rather than with physical aggression"
Which put a crimp in "testosterone is baaaad".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
A world of chickness where all the men are women and all the women are insane children.
These goofy studies come out from time to time. It makes the liberal feminists feel good about themselves. It's kind of like the Academy Awards where those in the industry celebrate themselves. Self serving stuff.
Falling trees would disagree.
Myostation, whihc makes them a fifth as strong as other apes the weight. It is thought this diverted metabolic resources to the brain and running. Undergorund chemists are seeking to neutralize of this statin to improve athletes. Medical scientists hopign to stop muscle wasting in dystropy and old people.
Arts and crafts became popular as testosterone declined, giving rise to Rock Martha Stewart:
[ Picks louse from armpit bush, holds up for camera ] Tired same old pit bug taste? Try leaf.
[ Sprinkles pinch of random leaf on louse, eats ] It good thing.
In other words, civilization boomed as men found they needed to go potty more and more in the middle of the night...
Grad student should fail. Remember the Nazis measuring skulls to prove Jews were one step from apes.
Other apes are social too. And testosterone has nothing to do with cooperation or non-cooperation. We are talking about simians here, we are APES for $deitie's sake, not about bovines. I would understand the testosterone point if we were talking about some sort of big badass bulls or moose but not SIMIANS.
Have the brilliant "scientists" who cooked up this study forgotten the gorilla's or chimps?
Dafuq mate?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Which may go a long way towards explaining why Blacks never built any significant civilisation in their lands.
"Mean testosterone levels in blacks were 19% higher than in whites, and free testosterone levels were 21% higher. Both these differences were statistically significant. Adjustment by analysis of covariance for time of sampling, age, weight, alcohol use, cigarette smoking, and use of prescription drugs somewhat reduced the differences. After these adjustments were made, blacks had a 15% higher testosterone level and a 13% higher free testosterone level."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Also see:
psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/race_evolution_behavior.pdf
This study may go a long way towards explaining why Blacks never built any significant civilisation in their lands.
"Mean testosterone levels in blacks were 19% higher than in whites, and free testosterone levels were 21% higher. Both these differences were statistically significant. Adjustment by analysis of covariance for time of sampling, age, weight, alcohol use, cigarette smoking, and use of prescription drugs somewhat reduced the differences. After these adjustments were made, blacks had a 15% higher testosterone level and a 13% higher free testosterone level."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
Also see:
psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/race_evolution_behavior.pdf
The study in question predates agriculture by 40,000 years.